Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), best known under the pen name Mark Twain, was a great American writer and humorist. On his death, the New York Times wrote that "his personality and his humor have been an integral part of American life for so long that it has seemed almost impossible to realize an America without him.[1] Mark Twain was famous as both a writer and a performer, having toured many years as a comedic lecturer. His cynical witticisms earned him a reputation as one of America's foremost personalities.

Quotations

"No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the congress is in session."

"In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards."[2]

"It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."

"By this time you will have noticed that the human being's heaven has been thought out and constructed upon an absolutely definite plan; and that this plan is, that it shall contain, in labored detail, each and every imaginable thing that is repulsive to a man, and not a single thing he likes!" [3]

"I have never taken any exercise, except sleeping and resting, and I never intend to take any."[4]

"Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education." [6]

Many quips attributed to Mark Twain are not his, due to what Ralph Keyes call the "the flypaper effect." The habit of unclaimed comments "sticking" to famous quotable figures. He quotes a librarian as saying "if it's humorous and cynical, it must be Mark Twain."[7] A famous disputed quote is "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." This has long been attributed to Twain. According to Keyes, quotation sleuths traced it to an unsigned editorial in the Hartford Courant and decided it was most likely by Charles Dudley Warner. However, there is evidence suggesting it may really be Twain's remark after all.[8]

A "Hymn to Liberty"

George Orwell said that "all that is best in [Twain]'s work centers about the Mississippi river and the wild mining towns of the West."[9] He specifically mentions Tom Sawyer,Huckleberry Finn, and Life on the Mississippi.

Orwell, who later would write Nineteen Eighty-Four, was writing during the Second World War, when individual freedom in Europe and England were at a low point. Orwell says that these books are set in "the golden age of America, the period when the great plains were opened up, when wealth and opportunity seemed limitless, and human beings felt free, indeed were free, as they had never been before and may not be again for centuries." He considered the books "ragbag[s] of anecdotes, scenic descriptions and social history both serious and burlesque" but Orwell also felt that they had a central theme:
"This is how human beings behave when they are not frightened of the sack (being fired). Orwell says Twain did not mean to write "a hymn to liberty," but did so simply by reporting what he saw. He feels that Twain's colorful characters were able to develop their "strange and sometimes sinister individuality because of the lack of any outside pressure: If you disliked your job you simply hit your boss in the eye and moved further west.... The "log cabin to White House" myth was true while the free land lasted. In a way, it was for this that the Paris mob had stormed the Bastille, and when one reads Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Whitman it is hard to feel that their effort was wasted.[10]

Religion

Mark Twain was a practicing Presbyterian, but a series of personal tragedies in his life, namely the deaths of his son, wife, and two of his daughters, would result in his later works being particularly anti-religious. His books Letters from the Earth and The Mysterious Stranger, both of which Twain was afraid to publish during his lifetime, contained numerous attacks on Christianity. Some of his quotes on the subject are listed below.

"'In God We Trust.' I don't believe it would sound any better if it were true."

"It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand."

"Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain of."

"There is no other life; life itself is only a vision and a dream for nothing exists but space and you. If there was an all-powerful God, he would have made all good, and no bad." [Mark Twain in Eruption]

"Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and remorseless exactness... It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading by contrast"[11]

The pen name "Mark Twain"

Clemens began using the pen name "Mark Twain" in his early newspaper columns.

Some believe "Mark Twain" was a reference to a leadsman's call. The leadsman's job was to toss a weighted line overboard to measure the depth of the water. On a Mississippi steamboat, he would do this again and again, calling out the results to the pilot. The depth was measured in fathoms, where a fathom is six feet. "Twain" is an old-fashioned word for "second." "Mark" meant the depth was on the exact fathom mark, much like describing a time as "on the dot." So "mark twain" literally means "two fathoms."

Others believe that "Mark Twain" refers to a then common method of ordering whiskey. "Mark Twain" referred to a double shot of the cheapest whiskey in the bar. Twain's penchant for cheap whiskey and cheap cigars lends credence to this theory.

In Life on the Mississippi, Twain says that he worked for a captain who used to send "brief paragraphs of plain practical information about the river" to the New Orleans Picayune (the famous newspaper), signed "Mark Twain." According to Twain, this captain always added little reminiscences about things like islands that "disappeared in 1807, if I remember rightly," which were annoying and drew the scorn of other captains. Twain wrote a humorous parody, without thinking about the captain's feelings, and was printed in a newspaper:

There was no malice in my rubbish; but it laughed at the captain. It laughed at a man to whom such a thing was new and strange and dreadful. He never printed another paragraph while he lived, and he never again signed "Mark Twain" to anything. At the time that the telegraph brought the news of his death, I was on the Pacific coast. I was a fresh new journalist, and needed a nom de guerre; so I confiscated the ancient mariner's discarded one.[12]

In this way he was able to tap into the popularity of an existing and well known name without having to establish his own reputation. There is no documentary evidence of Mark Twain ever having been a riverboat captain beyond his own claims in Life on the Mississippi.

↑Keyes p 194-5. Keyes also notes that the quotation, as printed in the Courant, actually opened with the words "A well known American writer once said," and that a 1923 memoir by a journalist who had known Twain mentioned never having seen in print Mark's saying about the weather